Kemi Badenoch hasn’t even been party leader for a month yet, but already the Tory vultures are circling.
“Where has she been and what has she been doing?” one senior Conservative lamented to HuffPost UK this week.
“When you’re in opposition, you don’t have the megaphone that government gives you, so you need to hustle and work harder to get the media to report on you.
“She’s done very little and nothing she has done – one GB News interview, a Telegraph sit down, a speech at the CBI, putting out social media videos on the Conservatives’ own channels – is talking to anyone beyond the tribe.”
Three underwhelming performances at PMQs have only served to further increase Tory anxiety about their new leader.
Some were stunned that she used last Wednesday’s occasion to suggest that Keir Starmer resign and let the Tories take over – less than five months after the party suffered its worst general election result in living memory.
Her spokesman later doubled down, insisting the Tories were ready to go to the country once again.
“Having her spokesman confirm after PMQs that she was calling on the PM to resign, dissolve parliament and call a fresh election lacked credibility and was a rookie error,” said one senior Conservative.
Badenoch has also succeeded in making Keir Starmer – by no means a natural at the despatch box himself – look comfortable and assured when facing her in the Commons.
One Labour insider drew an unflattering comparison between Badenoch’s early efforts and one of their own party’s former leaders.
“When she was speaking at the farmers’ protest, the first thing that came into my mind was ‘this is just like Jeremy Corbyn’,” he said.
“In March, the farmers were driving tractors in Whitehall protesting about the trade policies she brought in, and now she’s telling them what they want to hear. It’s the politics of perpetual opposition.
“They’ve just had an absolute hammering. If you want to show strength, you start by taking on your own side.
“But what they’re doing is jumping on every bandwagon and opposing absolutely everything that people don’t want us to do. In five years, we’ll reap the rewards of those tough decisions and they’ll have opposed them all.
“On all those big ticket items, whether it’s the economy, rebuilding the NHS, dealing with the cost of living, they were an absolute disaster in government.
“We’re fixing their mess while they’re enjoying opposition too much. It’s pure right-wing Corbynism.”
But a former Tory cabinet member, and no natural ally of Badenoch, defended their leader.
He said: “She’s got plenty of time, and what she’s doing now is playing herself into the role and Tory MPs are supporting her in doing that.
“I don’t think her performances at PMQs really matter at the moment – in five years’ time no one is going to remember them.”
A veteran Conservative backbencher added: “We’re not looking for Kemi to bring down the government right away – they’re working very hard at bringing themselves down anyway.
“We want the focus to be on the government and the mistakes they’re making at this point in the cycle.
“What is positive about Kemi is that she hasn’t made any specific policy commitments, because none of us know what the world is going to look like in four years’ time.
“I mean, four years ago no one would have predicted that Labour would now be in with a huge majority. People were talking about Boris being in for another 10 years.
“Tory MPs will be expecting progress and more accomplished performances in two years’ time, but no one’s panicking at the moment.”
But given the Tories’ recent propensity for dumping under-performing leaders, pressure is mounting on Badenoch to up her game.
Reform UK continue to breathe down the party’s neck – a fact acknowledged by the Tory leader’s hastily-arranged speech this week on immigration, in which she vowed to put a cap on the numbers coming into the UK while also flirting with the idea of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.
One Tory MP was able to identify a silver lining to the storm clouds which still hand over their party.
“If Tony Blair was prime minister, he would be wiping the floor with us,” he said.
“We’re only up against Starmer, which gives us all cause for optimism.”